Péter Magyar’s Tisza party has won a two-thirds supermajority in Hungary’s 199-seat parliament, built on nearly 80 percent turnout, the highest since the fall of state socialism. With some expatriate ballots still being counted, Tisza holds 140 seats to Fidesz’s 53, marking the end of Viktor Orbán’s self-styled “illiberal” rule.
Some analysts now suggest that Orbán’s government cannot have been truly authoritarian if it could be voted out this cleanly. That misses the point. What enabled change was not the mildness of his rule but a rare convergence of pressures: geopolitical isolation, economic malaise, moral crisis, and a disciplined challenger who mobilized previously passive citizens while sweeping aside other, discredited opposition forces.
But the deeper question is what exactly this result has broken. This was not the defeat of a government that had simply outstayed its welcome. It was the breakdown of a political settlement that had seemed, until recently, both electorally durable and socially entrenched. What broke on April 12 was Orbánism’s capacity to organize consent: across classes, across regions, and above all across generations.
There were clear signs of a struggle over what Antonio Gramsci called moral leadership. Former insiders, from the police, the military, and the state-adjacent expert world, stepped forward in the last weeks of the campaign to describe how public institutions were bent to party-political ends, how opponents were targeted, and how public service decayed under state capture. Magyar turned this into more than just a ”corruption” narrative. He cast the regime’s functionaries not only as self-serving, but as the custodians of a morally exhausted order.
That mattered because Fidesz did not rule by patronage and coercion alone, even though it relied on both increasingly. It also ruled by presenting itself as the guarantor of seriousness, order, family, work, and national protection. The discourse of the…
Auteur: Kristóf Szombati
